Archive for November, 2007

Spears Told to Pay Federline's Fees

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Britney Spears has been ordered to pay $120,000 in legal fees to her ex-husband Kevin Federline, who was awarded temporary custody of their young sons.

Superior Court Commissioner Scott M. Gordon ordered the pop star to pony up that much of the $154,500 in legal fees that Federline owes to his attorney, according to court papers filed Tuesday.

Gordon made the decision after considering factors including “the notable disparity between the parties’ income,” the ruling said.

A call to Spears’ attorney was not immediately returned.

Court papers released last week show that Spears makes roughly $737,000 per month and spends lavishly on clothes and entertainment.
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Britney Spears Chooses Next Single From Her Album "Blackout"

Hollywood, CA (CNS) – Although she failed to make the number one position on the charts both at home and abroad with less than stellar first-week sales, that hasn’t stopped the former pop princess from moving forward with her somewhat stagnant music career.

Coming off the heels from the heavily radio-played ‘Gimme Moore,’ Spears has chosen her second single off her latest album, Blackout, “Pieces of Me.” According to MTV, the track was produced by Bloodshy and Avant, the same team behind her Grammy-winning track “Toxic.”

Meanwhile, Spears’ personal life continues to slide on a downhill slope, with her ex-husband Kevin Federline’s legal team had called an emergency hearing to reach a compromise in regards to Spears’ random drug testing. Of the 14 tests the singer had been required to take, she had only responded to calls for six of them. Spears lost full-time custody of her two children, Sean Preston and Jayden James, earlier last month.
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Eagles Land Billboard #1 Over Britney Spears; Avenged Sevenfold …

Ouch. She couldn’t do it again.

Despite early projections — which, based on first-day sales figures, had beleaguered pop star’ first studio LP in four years opening at #1 on next week’s Billboard albums chart — it simply wasn’t meant to be. That’s thanks to an 11th-hour reversal of Billboard’s policy to not include albums sold exclusively through one retailer in the top 200 (see “Britney Spears’ Blackout Denied #1 Debut On Billboard Chart After Last-Minute Rule Change”).

Instead, the’ first studio LP in 28 years, Long Road Out of Eden, will take the chart’s peak position, with sales of nearly 711,000 copies, despite only being sold in Wal-Mart. That more than doubles the 290,000 scans generated by Spears’ Blackout, which fell more than 40,000 short of experts’ earliest sales estimates. Eden is the Eagles’ first release — apart from a few compilations — to debut at #1 since the mostly live Hell Freezes Over, which also entered on top back in 1994, with 266,700 copies sold. Eden is the band’s sixth release to bow at #1, and one of 2007’s best debuts, joining’s Graduation (957,000).

So rather than score the fifth #1 debut of her career, Spears finds herself in a position she’s never been in before: second place. Before Blackout’s release, all four of Brit’s previous outings debuted at #1: 1999’s … Baby One More Time (with 120,600 sold), 2000’s Oops! ..
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Britney Spears??™ home is a shrine to Kevin Federline

Britney Spears’ Malibu home is a shrine to her ex-husband, Kevin Federline, it has been reported.

Britney’s former assistant, Kalie Machado claims that the troubled ‘Gimme More’ singer has stuffed her Malibu mansion full of souvenirs to remind her of happier times – when she was with Kevin:

Kalie, 23 is quoted as saying: ‘Her house was her pride and joy, she kept all Kevin’s clothes and she would wander into his wardrobe looking at them. You could say it was a shrine to him – or to their marriage, at least.’Kalie claims, that despite Brit’s divorce from K-Fed last year – she still hoped to get back with Kevin.

‘She was incredibly sad and lonely while I was with her,’ she says. ‘I could tell she desperately wanted him back. She’d burst into tears when he wouldn’t return her calls.
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Britney Spears, Almost Triumphant

La la la la la la la la

Thanks to some weird backroom machinations, Britney Spears does not have the number one album in the country. And that’s fine; she shouldn’t. Long Road Out of Eden, the new album from the reunited Eagles, sold more than twice as many albums as Blackout, the new Britney thing. Not too surprising: Britney has obviously been on a massively public self-destruction rampage over the last couple of years, with pundit after pundit declaiming about how she’ll never be able to recover a shred of the stardom she once enjoyed, while the Eagles still have the best-selling album in history; their reunion is a big deal, despite the incontestable fact that they suck. (I have this theory that “Hotel California” is the worst song in the history of the universe. I hatched this theory during freshman year of college, when my roommate was trying to teach himself to play guitar by listening to the “Hotel California” mp3 over and over again and playing guitar along with it. He tried the same thing with “Tears in Heaven,” the second-shittiest song in the history of the universe.) Despite the massive disparity in their final sales-tallies, Britney briefly held the top spot because of some arcane Billboard rule that prevented the magazine from charting any album that was sold exclusively at one retail outlet. (You can only buy Long Road Out of Eden at Wal-Mart, and that album’s astronomical numbers, 711,000 sold, is another chilling testimony to that chain’s power.) Billboard changed its rules at the last second to account for the Eagles’ victory, and Britney’s failure to top the album charts on anything other than a technicality will probably be seen as the latest in an endless procession of public embarrassments. But Blackout isn’t the bomb that slavering tabloid-news shows the world over will almost certainly depict it as. The album sold nearly 300,000 copies in its first week, an impressive number coming from such a pilloried figure. And even if some of those sales did come from the car-crash appeal of its creator, at least a few of them must’ve come because it’s a pretty good album, one that might even yield more than one big single.

At this point, it’d be overkill to even begin to recount Britney’s string of misdeeds, but one of the really refreshing things about Blackout is the way it plays around with her trainwreck turboskank image without ever falling back on it. At the beginning of “Piece of Me,” she purrs, “I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17,” which, you have to give her, is an awfully weird thing to be. Very few people have become as famous as young as Britney Spears without completely falling apart somewhere down the line. But the funny thing about “Piece of Me” is how simultaneously defiant and happy she sounds about the whole turbulent circus she inhabits. It’s there, too, on the way she squeaks “center of attention,” on the sleek, layered single “Gimme More,” as if that position was something to aspire to, not something to dread.
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Mega-star 50 Cent says he's still seen as an armed thug

Nov 7, 2007, 11:01 GMT

Dublin – A little over an hour before he is due to blast onto stage with the force of a V8 engine, US rapper 50 Cent is tucked neatly into the corner of a sofa in his Dublin dressing room.

Handout picture released on 29 October 2007 shows US Rapper 50 Cent showing off the tricked-out Pontiac G8 he customized with Unique Autosports and General Motors during the SEMA after-market auto show in Las Vegas, Nevada on 29 October 2007. EPA/Isaac Brekken

His arms leave his lap only to emphasize gracefully a point as he speaks eloquently and softly of his career to date and his future plans in Hip Hop, a music genre in which he has achieved mega- stardom.

In an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, the trademark headscarf and New York peak cap, the pumped arms, tattoos and chunky jewellery of the artist known to his fans simply as 50 or ‘Fiddy’ are in place. The aggressive and explicit language, finger- jabbing, groin-grabbing and ‘disses’ (insults) can wait until the spotlights come on.

The US gangster turned musician, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, is touring Europe to promote his latest album (Curtis), with a string of concerts in cities in among others, the United Kingdom, Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic.

That he turned to music after an early life of drug-dealing in New York and survived a gang-related gun attack in which he was shot nine times, is widely known and appreciated by his fans.

His records reflect the aggression, violence, pain, contempt, and unabashed craving after and relish for the trappings of wealth and, some would say, sheer narcissism, that dominates the output of ‘gangsta’-style and mainstream rap culture and sells records like hotcakes.

In just a few years, he has become the artist industry players and fans alike look to for the future of an industry that has produced big names such as Dr Dre, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg and Eminem.

‘I’ve only been around for four years. It feels like a lot longer because I’ve been consistent in being involved with hit music and different things rapidly in that short period,’ he tells dpa.

Laying bare his life through his music has been a winning formula that he has no intention of diverting from in seeking recognition as ‘one of the biggest rap artists, if not the biggest’ rap artist.

He took his cue from those who have gone before him, in particular Eminem, the Detroit rapper who gave him a first step up the ladder.

‘I’ve watched my music break language barriers. Places where people don’t actually speak English, are filled, the arena is filled, the entire soccer fields are filled.’

He plans to take his music to a new level by looking deeper into his childhood and emotions at various points in his life, in trying to reach out to fans.

‘The kid that has my poster in his shack, he has to absolutely know that his dreams are possible because I exist. Because I come from not very much.
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Britney Spears reaches for the top, falls short on the charts

The stories on Britney Spears’ wild nights caught on camera, missed court dates and stints in rehab have recently consumed the media and haven’t left much room for positive attention.Not until she dropped her fifth album “Blackout” on Oct. 30. In the midst of the bad publicity, Spears makes her comeback with a strong 12-song album featuring upbeat music and lyrics that tell it like it is.The popular radio hit “Gimme More” was just a preview of what was to come.For the first time, Spears uses her life experiences to reach the audience, even if she isn’t the one writing the songs. “Piece of Me,” one of the better songs on the album, tells of the constant media attention and rumors. She sings, “Don’t matter if I step on the scene or sneak away to the Philippines/ they still gon’ put pictures of my derri??re in the magazine,” letting everyone know she is well aware that her every move is going to end up in the public eye.It then raises the question of why she continues to live the way she does, but we’ll save that for another story.After a disappointing performance from Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards earlier this year, fans became unsure of what to expect from the upcoming album.”I was hoping Britney would use her time on the VMAs to show everybody that she isn’t crazy and still has some tricks up her sleeve,” senior Communication Studies major Aaron Boggs said. “But all she did was prove that she’s completely lost it.”However, after listening to some of the songs off the CD, Boggs, 22, saw things a little differently and said he might even buy it for his sister.
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Kathy Griffin: From Outrageous Jesus Comments to Britney Spears

Kathy Griffin caused more than a stir among a whole lot of folks with her rail against Jesus last month after she collected an Emmy.  The “Life on the D-List” star was condemned when she made a speech that said, “A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. This award is my God now!”A lot of folks are angry about the red headed comic’s comments, saying the speech was vulgar and some were calling it a hate speech.  Now Kathy may be moving towards a bit of an easier target, Britney Spears.According to AOL’s Entertainment website TMZ.
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Spears' former manager filed lawsuit as a last resort

Britney Spears’ former manager is “disappointed” at the breakdown of their business relationship, but claims he was forced to sue the singer for unpaid commission as a last resort.Johnny Wright filed his lawsuit in Florida last week, accusing Spears of failing to pay him a share of her earnings last Christmas – even though a five-year deal she struck with the svengali doesn’t end until February 2008.And Wright claims he tried to help Spears deal with her problems before her pubic downfall, which saw her end up in rehab in February.He tells People.com: “I’ve reached out to the people around her, because I want to sit down with her and help in any way that I can. But I don’t know if my messages don’t get to her, or if she just doesn’t want to deal with me.”I didn’t want to sue Britney, but she didn’t leave me much choice.”I have worked with Britney in some capacity since she was 15.
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Spears headed for No. 1 slot

Troubled pop star Britney Spears’ new album is expected to reach the top slot despite a lack of publicity.

Her record label Jive Records was not able to get Spears to publicise the album because of her erratic behaviour, ananova.com reported. But the album is expected to head to the top slot and there doesn’t seem to be anyone else on the horizon who could compete with her.

Jessica Lekemann of Billboard.com said: “We’re looking positively at a Britney No 1.
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